Friday, January 13, 2012

"....Those of us journalists who saw the documents in Tripoli after the rebels had swept in were struck by the extent to which the British government was pressing its intelligence service to play a key role in the rapprochement with Gaddafi's regime. Much of the handling of Blair's 2004 "deal in the desert" was delegated by Downing Street to the men from Vauxhall Cross.

And Blair had to thank the SIS and Allen for one of his triumphs of foreign policy which stood in stark contrast to the disaster of Iraq: the negotiations which led to Gaddafi giving up his WMD programme and, crucially, the secret nuclear supermarket for rogue states run by the Pakistani scientist AQ Khan. Such was the MI6 influence that an MI6 official wrote Gaddafi's speech renouncing chemical and biological weapons.....

Having taken the plaudits, Blair and Straw were very keen to deny knowledge of MI6's activities when, post-Gaddafi, the documents began to surface. It will be interesting to see what Scotland Yard uncovers about who knew what was going on...."